Apple II Bits

When I first encountered Out of This World for the Super Nintendo, I was absolutely fascinated. I’d never played Prince of Persia before, so the realistic art enabled by rotoscoping was new and amazing to me. The puzzles were also nearly inscrutable: playing as a human transported to an alien world, I had a language barrier that left me with few clues, countless deaths, endless experimentation, and victorious jubilation. My only disappointment was that the game was too short: a speedrun takes only 10–15 minutes.

Since the Super NES and the Apple IIGS share the same processor, the game eventually made its way to the IIGS, largely because the developer was told it wasn’t possible:

And to think I did the port because I was told “it couldn’t be done”. I proved them wrong.

— Rebecca Heineman (@burgerbecky) January 31, 2019

If a conversion to a 16-bit Apple II seemed impossible, Vince Weaver, aka "deater", has kicked it up (or down?) a notch with his 8-bit demake:

Like his previous ports of Portal and Kerbal Space Program, Weaver’s version of Out of This World is incomplete, consisting of only the first two levels and deaths. But even this limited proof of concept is fun and and impressive, which you can see for yourself by downloading the disk image and source code from his website. The game runs on any Apple II with at least 16K of RAM.

Out of This World, under its original title of Another World, has been ported to many other platforms and is now enjoying historic re-releases. The 20th anniversary edition first appeared on consoles in 2014; in 2018, it landed on the current generation, that being the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, available as downloads only.

Despite having the original SNES cartridge, I’ve nonetheless plunked down USD$29.99 + S&H on the upcoming physical, retail copy of the Switch edition, courtesy Limited Run Games. It was just too good an opportunity to own this game again — be it on floppy disk, disk image, or cartridge. After more than two decades, I’m sure its puzzles will again take me longer than 15 minutes to solve!

UPDATE (March 2, 2019):: Weaver has now ported the introductory cinematic movie as well: